Hey guys! If your interested in purchasing a MacbookPro I did some testing between the 2014 version with Nvidia graphics and the 2015 version with the new AMD graphics. Tested with both Final Cut X and Premiere Pro CC using both CUDA and OpenCL. Found some interesting results. Hope this helps some of you guys with questions of which one to get as well as which NLE software to use. If this would help someone with a question I'd appreciate the share!

Reminds me of when I tried to dump AOL, swore I was going to have a full blown panic attack before I cancelled my account with them.

Why is it necessary to contact customer support to cancel your subscription? I mean people like Red Giant make it easy to exit out. No questions asked and only a few simple clicks to do so, very much I like. I remember when customers and employees came first, not so sure about that now. At least from what I have seen.

I need Light Room to take over for Aperture. I was all set to get their cloud version as my 1 month trial is ending. Maybe I should just buy LR 5 instead. I don't really need the Photo Shop that comes bundled with LR CC. Hmmmn.

Affinity Photo is really good. I think once Photos integrates it via app extensions you'll be able to use Photos as a catalogue and Affinity Photo for more extended works. Affinity has just absolutely lightning fast software, and despite still paying for CC, I'm using their apps more and more. I'm a bit biased though because I can't find my cancel subscription button. Terrible business practice.

Hello Max,
If I do understand your test results - you found that in moderate Premiere Pro workflow there is just slight difference between 2014 and 2015 MacBook Pro, while in moderate to intensive FCP X workflow there is significant gain in performance of 2015 over 2014 MacBook Pro. What makes me super-puzzled, and leaves me in strong disbelieve is side result of your tests which- if I got it right, same GH4 source files rendered in a same fashion to same output format resulted in similar output files sizes while FCP X regularly finished job approx. 10 times faster then Premiere Pro! If it was just for stabilization plugin I would ask for IQ comparison, but you got same relative difference even in simple recompress tasks! I can believe that there is always some difference in software optimizations and that one could be measurably faster then the other, but 10 times faster on same hardware and same OS just looks too extreme not to be praised on each and every corner of the Internet...
Pease, can you confirm my understanding of you findings..
Are you completely sure that you used same codecs and rendering methods and wrapper formats in both FCP X and Premiere Pro?

Yes I'm 100% sure. For encoding FCX is taking great advantage of quick sync where PP is not. Same with effects like image stabilization. FCX is using alms or 100% of CPU and almost 100% of GPU where PP is about 10% CPU and 20ish (if I remember right) percent of CPU.

I edited with PP for years but after learning FCX it's hard to go back. I only use PP when clients require it.

Hello Max,
If I do understand your test results - you found that in moderate Premiere Pro workflow there is just slight difference between 2014 and 2015 MacBook Pro, while in moderate to intensive FCP X workflow there is significant gain in performance of 2015 over 2014 MacBook Pro. What makes me super-puzzled, and leaves me in strong disbelieve is side result of your tests which- if I got it right, same GH4 source files rendered in a same fashion to same output format resulted in similar output files sizes while FCP X regularly finished job approx. 10 times faster then Premiere Pro! If it was just for stabilization plugin I would ask for IQ comparison, but you got same relative difference even in simple recompress tasks! I can believe that there is always some difference in software optimizations and that one could be measurably faster then the other, but 10 times faster on same hardware and same OS just looks too extreme not to be praised on each and every corner of the Internet...
Pease, can you confirm my understanding of you findings..
Are you completely sure that you used same rendering methods and formats in both FCP X and Premiere Pro?

PS - if I understand your testing methodology - your H.264 settings are aimed at low bitrate internet delivery format, while there is no test of broadcast delivery formats or intermediate formats... Did you learn that PremierePro and AME can encode single pass and to/from ProRes 422 as well? In my everyday workflow I find ProRes quite useful in PremierePro where it is twice faster then Cineform codec, and faster then Avid DNxHR (I run i7 5960x rig).

[Aindreas Gallagher]"I think this is wonderful. I feel we should celebrate all editing systems, each with their own specific charms. They are all special snowflakes."

Holy cow! Somebody call a doctor! Aindreas must have fallen and hit his head on something! ;-)

Try quitting Twitter. I was on it for a total of 5 days (useless digital noise IMHO) and it took three months for them to finally stop trying to lure me back ("pssst. hey man, we still have your account ready. c'mon, just press that reactivate button in this e-mail. you know you want to...."). Like a damn drug dealer....

random blog - and full disclosure, I don't personally run trimming this religiously at all. But it's an interesting article to read, because that optional hidden trim state revert button is something that will never, and can never happen in the world of FCPX.

The notion that speed is based on footage categorisation, where X excels, or render speeds, where I think it's more fluid than presented, gets away from a core issue.

Does exposure to software vendor complexity allow craft skilled practitioners to shortcut any identifiable practise? Isn't that the real time saving? Isn't it consensual?

does a H264 sprint export beat the limitations of the primary timeline? If anyone is going to try and say that the apple timeline is not massively and deliberatively circumscribed - I have bridge to sell you. And a trim edit revert session button. Apple have effectively tried to place a high noise software filter on the operation of editing. I'm still not exactly sure why they tried to do this. As Tim pointed out: they have roughly half the user base they had with 7. What was it all for?

So a few things. I'm pretty sure there are installed users with FCPX then there were with 7. The timeline works for plenty of people, including myself and several of our in house staff. Also, to negate the real cost-saving features associated with one part of the app with your feelings about the workflow decisions Apple has made doesn't really equal out. They're all great apps and all very capable. The best editors I've seen also have the simplest and cleanest looking timelines.

I think someone is inventing something that doesn't exist. Basically, to me, it looks like Premiere added a new button and its ability to undo everything from when you invoked trim mode. Nifty. They had to call that something and I guess "undo trim" was unclear because every little tweak could be an undo. So they called it revert trim session which to me was very clear. It doesn't appear to me that any special nuances have been created. A different undo button perhaps. And playing back while trimming is new? I do that all the time in X. In fact I can move clips around and make edits without stopping playback. This is a big deal? Guess I'm missing something, but that wouldn't be anything new either. :)

If I may say so, it's one of my better posts here. Certainly one of my most succinct. LOL Highlights include:

...although my timing was off, I was in fact right three years ago: that Apple would be making more from an APP version of the ProApps in a year than they'd made in the entire history of FC Legend.

And

It's ultimately a confirmation that Steve was right, that a low-cost video creation platform could be a money-maker for Apple, WITHOUT heavy iron, which was never the point. Computer sales, yes. Top of the line computer sales, absolutely not. Monitor sales, absolutely not. It's no accident that...wait for it...the IMAC is such a sweet spot. That was the plan from the beginning.

It included some other juicy tidbits, including the historical note that Steve had tried to buy Premiere from Adobe as the consumer video software he'd including on the shiny new iMac. It was only when he was rebuffed that he turned to Macromedia hoping to buy the cross-platform Final Cut to turn THAT into the consumer video software he'd include on the new iMac.

That obviously changed in practice, as iMovie spun out of it and Final Cut became a professional offering -- even though it was first dismissed as a toy for skaters and fanboys. Sound familiar?

Anyway, again not denying that I said anything I don't remember saying. There's a LOT I don't remember saying that I'm sure I did. LOL I wouldn't bet any money at all on my memory.

But the idea that Apple would make more the pro app APPS each year than they had in the entire history of FCP-FCS -- that one I happen to have a citation for my prediction AND the citation that I was correct.

THAT time. LOL It doesn't happen that often, so THOSE I tend to remember. LOL

So if your NLE is constrained to OSX, and if you you use a laptop to edit with, then FCPX is superior to Ppro when exporting - is that the deal? Fantastic, now let me get back to using PPro on my old Mac Pro, and if i want to decrease my export times I'll buy a faster GPU, and if I want to increase my Ppro efficiency further, I'll buy a PC workstation.

[Herb Sevush]"So if your NLE is constrained to OSX, and if you you use a laptop to edit with, then FCPX is superior to Ppro when exporting - is that the deal? Fantastic, now let me get back to using PPro on my old Mac Pro, and if i want to decrease my export times I'll buy a faster GPU, and if I want to increase my Ppro efficiency further, I'll buy a PC workstation.
"

Did you check out the spreadsheet he posted? On workstations (Mac Pro & iMacs) FCPX came out ahead on all but one render. And you can go ahead and install Windows w/ Premiere and immediately start making compromises. Make sure you're running CC 2014 because 2015 is too buggy for production work. Also, Windows 7 because 8 is dead, but also Windows 10 is about to come out with an aggressive update schedule so you may want to do that but not for active production work. That sounds like fun. In the meantime, I guess we'll all just be rendering faster in on our software optimized for our hardware by the same manufacturer. Is that the deal?

If history is any guide, that will be true till the next upgrade, out in a few weeks.

[Chris Frantz]"Also, Windows 7 because 8 is dead, but also Windows 10 is about to come out with an aggressive update schedule so you may want to do that but not for active production work. That sounds like fun."

Oh yes, because every OSX update has been simple and clean. Yosemite anyone?

[Chris Frantz]" In the meantime, I guess we'll all just be rendering faster in on our software optimized for our hardware by the same manufacturer. Is that the deal?"

You have to run FCPX if you own a MBP because while it is indeed optimized for FCPX it pretty much sucks at everything else. How's that for childish overstatement?

Back in the real world, use whatever you like, they each have their strengths and weaknesses, and the only efficiency test that matters is the one where you compare your exact workflow to all the other options - it's not a numbers game, I don't edit with Geekbench3 S.

If it's not a numbers game then why respond? For the record, Yosemite works great and El Capitan public beta is ages ahead of Windows 10. Life is a compromise and maybe there's a fix coming in a few weeks for general bugginess? Those aren't resounding points about anything, much less a render score. If you'd like to see additional tests done, then you should do them and add them to the spreadsheet, otherwise you're introducing points without any data to back them up.

[Chris Frantz]"For the record, Yosemite works great and El Capitan public beta is ages ahead of Windows 10."

For the record Ppro 2015 works great. Except when it doesn't. Which was certainly so true of Yosemite that many editors still haven't upgraded to it. The public outcry of Yosemite screwing up drivers and peripherals from coast to coast was/is easily as large as the public problems with CC 2015. As for "my Beta is better than your Beta" - I don't know anyone who uses Beta software to pay the rent, and that's why it's called "Beta."

[Chris Frantz]"If you'd like to see additional tests done, then you should do them and add them to the spreadsheet, otherwise you're introducing points without any data to back them up."

My point is quite simple - talking about the speed of your MBp is like talking about the speed of my Subaru Forester - interesting up to a point, but if I were interested in speed I wouldn't be driving a Subaru.

[Herb Sevush]"As for "my Beta is better than your Beta" - I don't know anyone who uses Beta software to pay the rent, and that's why it's called "Beta.""

Windows 10 is still a garbage fire in terms of broken UI elements and system demolishing bugs. It's a massive update and is about to come out. El Capitan is incremental and introduces performance updates mostly. Eventually people will have to upgrade, and it certainly helps to read the tea leaves ahead of time.

Troubleshooting options is one. Last time I had an issue with CC 2014, Adobe's only solution was to upgrade to Yosemite as that would fix the GPU problem. We were locked to Mavericks due to XSAN incompatibility which made that not an option, and our fancy Mac Pro unable to render jobs out of Premiere without GPU errors. In a SaaS model, developers tend to focus on the latest versions of everything so backwards support may become less of an issue for them. On that note though, Apple doesn't even attempt it as they won't even allow anything prior to Yosemite run 10.2. I guess there's a reason some shops still run FC7 and an ancient version of OSX, the bugs you know are better than the ones you don't.

Render and output is certainly an important function of NLEs but in my opinion it is not as critical as playback and latency while editing. I tried FCPX in the early days and didn't really go far enough to know how I felt about the magnetic timeline etc. because it was unusably laggy.

Does anyone have a comparison (even anecdotal) about FCPX and PPro in terms of playback and UI responsiveness these days?

for example:

- Number of multicam tracks of 1080p prores that will play simultaneously with or without basic filters like a primary colour correction
- latency when hitting play / stop (Even back in the PPro version 5 days - it was more responsive than FCP7 which always seemed to me to have about 1/10th of a second lag)

[andy lewis]"Does anyone have a comparison (even anecdotal) about FCPX and PPro in terms of playback and UI responsiveness these days?"

Every editor has certain points that matter to him or her more than other bits. At the end, it is the summation of the tools and how it feels to you that probably go a long way to you choosing one over the other...

I personally agree that the perceived responsiveness is important to a large section of editors. It is something that I hear a lot from my large media clients in NYC and on the East Coast. It is something that Adobe has put a lot of time into and we want to continue to focus on for the future. For Adobe that has meant, performance with 3rd party hardware, JKL and mouse scrubbing as well as lag time with space bar play/pause.

That said, there are a huge number of factors that go into the net result, so it is difficult to quantify. Some will say it's awesome, some less so.

Also, on the original post, let me say that it seems (though I haven't looked closely) that the testing methodology, source footage, details of effects, render output settings and probably a few more things should I think about it weren't carefully set out. Always important if you're trying to compare 'apples to apples' - it makes or breaks a lot of the validity of the tests themselves.

Nevertheless, full thanks to Max for taking the time to talk about Macs and how they relate to overall render time performance. I think that the output times are impressive and undoubtedly all vendors aspire to make their outputs as fast and high quality as possible. Certainly, Adobe will continue to work towards that goal.